ANSEP middle school and high school academies: preparing Alaska's future engineers.

• Author: Slaten, Russ
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Alaska Native Business

In a state that faces some of the highest education costs and lowest performance scores in the nation, one program is building a pipeline to prepare students for some of the most demanding industries in Alaska. The Alaska Native Science & Engineering Program (ANSEP) at the University of Alaska Anchorage is designed to prepare and support Alaska Native students from middle school through graduate school and build a career path to succeed in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields.

Ninety-five percent of students that participate in the ANSEP high school-level Acceleration Academy advance one level in math or science each summer, according to the Urban Institute.

"The very best Acceleration Academy students are selected and can begin working with our industry partners immediately after they graduate from high school through the Summer Bridge component," says Herb Schroeder, the founder and Vice Provost of ANSEP. "I call it career visioning--students have a real opportunity to see what it's like to work in the oil and gas industry or to work in a conservation career with a federal or state agency."

Rough Start

Schroeder is not only the founder and Vice Provost of ANSEP but also a professor of engineering at the University of Alaska Anchorage. When he started the program in 1995, Schroeder was working for the US government to discover better solutions for rural sanitation to replace honey buckets. He says in his work in rural Alaska he had never met an Alaska Native engineer.

"Engineers were non-Native from outside the state, and there were serious communication problems between the people that lived in the communities and the engineers, So since I was an engineering professor at the university I said--naively--I'll just make some Native engineers, before I really understood the issues," Schroeder says.

He started by arranging funding from Alyeska Pipeline Service Company to offer scholarships to Alaska Natives. Schroeder says he saw blowback from the engineering department, but even after he pushed back and saw some of the program's first students, he realized they were not academically and socially prepared for the university.

"Academically I'd say they were like eighth graders, so they had a long way to go before they could ever take a college-level course," Schroeder says.

Schroeder set out to find the root of the problem by reaching out to the districts responsible for teaching the students in Alaska's rural...